It wasn’t too long ago that people said no one would ever buy shoes online. Clearly, the success of Zappos.com has proved that people indeed buy shoes — lots of them — online. But does that mean consumers will shop online for flooring? As it turns out, that still has not been answered other than to say, it depends.

Area rugs, it seems, is one category that is relatively easy to sell online. “Area rugs are the exception,” said Jay Flynn, vice president of sales and marketing for Creating Your Space. “You can ship from the mill, and it’s easier to manage.”

It is somewhat inevitable that companies and dealers are exploring online options.

“Today’s consumer has an expectation to shop online,” said John Weller, vice president of marketing for FloorForce.

“People are more and more comfortable purchasing online,” Flynn said. “There’s obvious flow through to the flooring industry, but our products aren’t as obvious. With shoes you can just buy them and return them. Well, you can’t just drop off a pallet of tile and send it back if you don’t like it.” Plus, he noted, other factors play into flooring purchases, such as installation and peripheral products.

The dichotomy raises a few questions. If consumers aren’t really buying hard flooring online, will they? And if they won’t, what’s the benefit for retailers and dealers to be online at all?

Software vendors said while selling online might be challenging, websites do indeed drive sales in a variety of ways.

FloorForce, for example, enables independent dealers to automatically showcase full product catalogs. What’s more, the company recently launched a “shop at home” module that allows consumers to select products by room and project, request samples and even schedule an in-home consultation. “Everything we do is to try to put dealers in a place of maximizing the technology and put them in a position to compete with big box stores,” Weller said. And while FloorForce’s platform is fully e-commerce capable, he noted that online selling still is focused on area rugs.

Besides showrooming and window shopping, websites are powerful marketing tools. Sites can be used to better track leads and for consumer follow-up, for example. “Our CRM features will soon integrate with lead retrieval systems,” said Chad Ogden, CEO for QFloors. “This ensures prompt follow-up and that no leads fall through the cracks.” It also gives retailers metrics to follow up on marketing campaigns as well as tools to track which products consumers are shopping for.

Indeed, diagnostics and tools are some of the most critical — if not sometimes overlooked — benefits to websites, even more so than being e-commerce capable. “Every business should load Google analytics or some other analytics,” said Licia Baily, a web consultant who works with QFloors. She noted that it takes less than an hour to load it and even if you don’t understand all the data, the data will become increasingly important. “There’s no reason not to do this,” she said.

“Big data” is critical in planning marketing programs, and analytics and other tools help refine that. FloorForce, for example, has more than 250,000 dedicated flooring keywords used in search. ‘We track every keyword that sends a customer to a dealer site,” said Dan Gerrell, director of Internet Marketing Services. “It’s all in the data and how people use the sites.”

Not only are consumers becoming more familiar with shopping — or browsing — online, they are turning more to phones and tablets for their online usage. Because of that, dealers should start focusing on responsive design — basically designing sites depending on how they are used, from computers to smartphones. “Most flooring companies are not incorporating it,” Bailey said. But, she added, they should; one company she works with saw 40 percent of its consumers access the site through tablets and mobile devices.

“Mobile optimized websites are a very important part of the internet landscape of today and exponential growth for the future is guaranteed,” FloorForce’s Gerrell said. FloorForce is working on a responsive design platform, although Gerrell noted that all websites are “mobile friendly out of the gate” and there is a mobile optimized option available.

At the heart of the matter is determining exactly what the consumer is looking for online and really knowing what the right model is for each specific dealer. Not everything works for every retailer. “A lot of it starts with the conversation,” Flynn said. “[Retailers] sometimes just want to jump right into it, but they don’t understand the structure. That’s my job — to build long-term revenue. Just because we can build an e-commerce engine for them doesn’t mean it’s right for them.”

“E-commerce can be very expensive,” Bailey said. “It may not be right for every business.”And it’s most important, Gerrell from FloorForce said, to give consumers a similar message across all channels. What is on the web should be the same as what is in stores or even in print. “Consistency is key online,” he said.